Post navigation

Tournament Battle 001 – Nick's Quest for Retribution

This weekend the Combo Smite team played in our first official Steamroller tournament. The tournament took place last weekend at a local game store in London, The Game Chamber. (PLUG!!) It was a 35pt Steamroller 3 list required and during list selection your opponent vetoes one of your lists and you get to pick from the remaining two.

As this was my first tournament I was not very on the ball with taking photos every turn but hopefully its enough to get the gist of the games.

I won the starting roll and chose first. Here is what the board looked like after both our 1st turns.

On turn 2 I feat and wipe out most of his Gun Mages and rangers and both units flee.

The next turn almost the whole MHSF is within aiming range of Kara who is hiding behind the house. With some epic shitty dice rolling only 1 or 2 of them hit. So next turn He stays right where he was. I guess my shitty dice rolls lulled him into a false sense of security. Anyway I do the same thing next turn and my 3rd last Mage Hunter puts Kara into the dirt.

Thoughts:

He was in a tough spot those last couple turns because his models were fleeing and if he ran Kara away from the MHSF he would be running right TOWARD a fully loaded Hyperion. That’s like behind stuck between a rock and a place with lots of magic LoS ignoring crossbow bolts.

GAME 2 VS MARX

Second round Aaron Marc and I have all won our first round games (Who’d have thought) so we know at 2 of us are going to get paired up (its a small tournament).

As it turns out Marc and I get paired up and he Vetoes my eVyros list. I know my Ravyn list would trump his Kara Sloan but his Siege would trump my Ravyn. So I dropped Ossyan expecting Marc to drop Siege and I was right.

On my first turn I get my jollies by showing off the extreme threat ranges of my Halberdiers under quicken and desperate pace. They run 18″ across the board to generally make a nuisance of themselves. Everything else moves up behind. On his turn Marc moves up his rangers who pick off a few Halberdiers. Storm lances assault forward but don’t get in range of anything. Siege kills a bunch of Halberdiers. Stormwall puts out some covering fire and misses a couple Halbs.

The right flag goes away. My Rifles kill some Rangers. I charge my halbs into his Stormlances and Rangers and kill some more. I don’t have time to activate Ossyan, my stormfalls, my banshee or A&H which sucks but I didn’t want to waste my extension because I didn’t have anything important for them to do this turn. On his turn Marc kills a couple Halbs with Lances. Rangers move over to the middle flag. Also blocking out Stormwall from controlling. Katherine runs to control the left flag. Siege moves up and groundpounders 4 Riflemen into dust. I can already feel the game slipping away from me so I have to do my best to make some points back. First Ossyan moves up and feats. He has Stormwall and one lance in range. He fires on Stormwall and hits does light damage. The Banshee fires on Stormwall and boosts damage with Arcanist focus. My riflemen CRA one lance to death. Stormfalls Brutal shot the Stormwall but my rolls are lacklustre. At this point I realize that I forgot to use Aiyanna to harm the stormwall beforehand, which sucks a lot because I might have killed it if I had. Finally my Halbs charge the Lances but miss their attack. On this turn Katherine runs to the middle flag and Siege run to attempt to dominate the right flag for the win but he can’t quite get there. His lances whiff attack rolls on my halbs and Stormwall kills some more infantry. On my turn I charge the Banshee into the stormwall but STILL fail to kill it. BOO!!! My stormfalls use brutal shots to kill Katherine and Aiyanna and Holt run in to contest the middle flag. I run my HG Thane to try to contest Siege’s flag but I can’t get close enough. So on his turn Marc moves base to base with the flag for the win. Victory to Cygnar! BOOO!!!

Thoughts:

This loss is annoying because its so preventable. I lots swathes of infantry due to poor placement and after the flag disappeared I failed to adjust to the Scenario. I had a good chance shift my entire force to the right and block out the right flag but as is tradition when I play Ossyan I typically start seeing blood around turn 2 and try to kill all the things with Ossyan’s feat. It might not have made any difference but I certainly played this game as badly as I could have.

OK on to Game 3 Vs. Trolls

I have extremely little experience against Trolls so I had no idea what anything in any of my opponent’s lists did so I vetoed his pMadrak list because I had heard he was nearly impossible to assassinate and I like having the option of winning that way.

As it was he selected his eMadrak list which was:
eMadrak
*Mulg
*Earthborn
Krielstone + Scribes + UA
Warders
Janissa
Some solo I don’t know

There might be something I missed so if that doesn’t add up, too bad.

He vetos my Ossyan list so I finally get to play eVyros, which is good because he is a lot of fun. I win the die roll and choose 1st turn because Vyros REALLY wants to go first.

This is the board after my first turn. My AD’d sentinels are up near the center line with my line of Jacks nipping on their heels.

I didn’t take a photo after my opponent’s first turn but he basically just moved up as much as he could and put out an ungodly amount of buffs. Basically everything was DEF17 and ARM 22. I exaggerate but it seemed like it.On my second turn I charge in with my sents on his Warders. I don’t kill any but 2 of them have very bad bruises. Vyros moves up and Feats and Griffons just position themselves as safely as they can out of his beasts’ charge ranges.

On his turn his warders kills all my sentinels except for the UA and the rest of the brick shuffles up the board slowly.My feat moves were mostly wasted because I didn’t want to move Griffons into threat range of his Beasts and they were mostly already in my own threat range.On my turn I give 3 focus to the Griffon nearest Mulg and 2 to the Phoenix. 1 griffon smacks the objective to start the Synergy Train. Vyros ride-bys up smacks a Warder and ride-bys back on the hill, narrowly avoiding a free strike. The griffon in the right zone kills the solo. The other kills 2 Warders. The Phoenix Kills 2 more and Finally my last Griffon charges into mulg under CP for a total PS of 20, Which is pretty impressive but not enough to do more than scratch him up a bit. Mulg was at Def 16 Arm 21 so it went about as it should.

No pics for this but on his turn Mulg pounded the Griffon to dust. The Earthborn moved up and hit the Phoenix 7 times (SEVEN ATTACKS WTF!!) with his own Sword but still fails to bring him down. I think he had about 3 boxes left.On my turn I build my Synergy up again and send in another Griffon to try to finish off Mulg. Unfortunately He again fails to get the job done. This time I blame 2 missed attacks. Missing at MAT10 just ruins your day.

I forgot to take pics of the remaining turns but Basically how it went is:

-Mulg atomizes another griffon.
-Earthborn finishes off the Phoenix
-Madrak and co shuffle into the left zone and take out the Objective but can’t dominate because my arcanist is still contesting.

On my turn Vyros kills the right objective and dominates the zone for 3 cps.

On his turn he kills my arcanist and runs a Warder into my zone to contest. All his other stuff is too slow to get over there.

On my turn all I have to do is kill the warder and run a model to contest his zone for the win but they call dice down and i am robbed of a potential easy victory (barring unnatural tough rolls).

Victory to Trolls!!

Thoughts:

Losing on dice down when you are seconds from winning really sucks. This is only my first tournament and I have already tasted the shittiness of timed turns. My biggest regret is not going for my zone 1 turn earlier. There would have been no way he could have stopped me if I had woken up a bit earlier. Oh well live and learn.

Final thoughts:

This was my first tournament and it was a blast, despite losing 2 of my 3 games. I can’t wait to play in another tournament and I am really liking playing with timed turns because it gives us way more time to play more games instead of playing 1 game for 4 hours.

Any tips on lists or tactics are more than welcome. Thanks for reading!

3 thoughts on “Tournament Battle 001 – Nick's Quest for Retribution”

Good report, Nick. I think you needed to be a little more attentive to Scenario conditions, since 2 of your games were easily in your grasp if you had pushed for it instead of attrition… also, and this is going to sound particularly stupid: you used to go 2nd all the time and WIN all the time. Now you’re consistently going first and struggling to win as often. I don’t think that’s coincidence… I mean, I might be wrong (probably!), but going 2nd really makes you think about the scenario as a viable option, since you have the benefit of getting to score first. Just food for thought.

Other than that, the dice-down call against the Troll player was particularly brutally timed. 10 seconds and that game was yours (unless he rolled tough 7 times in a row… not impossible, but pretty improbable).

I’ve been burned by dice down before too, it stings. Luckily you won’t have to worry about that for the next one, deathclock. With all the new toys you’ve received (as Ret) I expect big things from you 😉